


but you don't have it anymore

by sleeplessmiles



Series: iscariot [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Allusions to canon suicide attempts, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Past Brainwashing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:44:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3211301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleeplessmiles/pseuds/sleeplessmiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, Jemma Simmons promised Grant Ward that should they ever cross paths again, he wouldn’t live to tell the tale. </p><p>She never really expected to be in a position to make good on her threat.</p><p>But then, she leaves SHIELD.</p><p>--</p><p>Ward and Kara (Agent 33) track Jemma down, seeking her help in removing Kara’s mask. </p><p>[Set six(-ish) months in the future.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	but you don't have it anymore

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I get angry at people's theories and then angry-write things. This was one of those times.
> 
> Please note the warnings in the tags. Also, there's a little swearing.

 

Once upon a time, Jemma Simmons promised Grant Ward that should they ever cross paths again, he wouldn’t live to tell the tale. 

She never really expected to be in a position to make good on her threat.

But then, she leaves SHIELD.

 

-

-

 

It’s not as though they announce themselves, but Jemma has learned that the nasty intruders rarely do. When the silent alarms are triggered down the hall from her apartment, she barely has time to grab her ICER (from where it rests at the small of her back, tucked into her jeans) when the door is kicked open. The gun is immediately torn from her grip, caught off-guard as she is, but she’s familiar enough with her slowness by now, already reaching back for her knife.

She has the knife to his throat before she even registers who it is.

‘Sorry for the entrance.’

Ward.

Jemma could almost drop the dagger out of pure shock. She very much doesn’t.

‘How did you find me?’ she demands, keeping her voice impressively steady.

(Practice will do that.)

‘I have my ways.’

She pushes the blade closer.

 _Not good enough_.

He sighs, glancing down at the knife then back to her face. ‘I need your help.’

All Jemma can do in response is open and close her mouth a couple of times, so struck with anger and disbelief that she’s actually been rendered speechless.

‘Are you actually – ’

‘ – It’s not for me,’ he preempts.

Then his companion rounds the doorway, and Jemma blanches, because she now understands what’s being asked of her, here. It took them a while to get the full story, but they’d eventually learnt all about the woman forced to wear May’s face.

Agent 33. Kara Lynn Palamas.

The one Hydra brainwashed.

Jemma swallows.

Kara’s regarding Jemma with unabashed interest, almost as though she’s recalling something, and it’s May’s face but it’s  _not_ , the subtleties of the expression just  _off_  in the most miniscule of ways. 

(Privately, Jemma thinks she would have seen right through Agent 33’s charade immediately, but then, of course, it’s possible that she’s more May-like when she’s making a conscious effort. This is not Agent 33 as May. This is simply Kara.) 

She appears to realise how fixated she’s become on Jemma’s face, at any rate, because she shakes her head a little to clear it, seeming embarrassed. It’s sweet, and it’s unassuming, and Jemma really doesn’t know what to make of it.

‘Sorry,’ Kara says, voice quiet but not unkind. ‘You just seem familiar. Did we know each other?’

‘I’m… afraid not, no.’

(She hasn’t lowered the knife from Ward’s throat. She can’t.)

‘I know this is a real inconvenience, and I know you have absolutely no reason to help me…’

But the thing is, she does. Even now, she just wants to use her knowledge to help people – that’s what started this whole split in the first place. And she so rarely gets to use any of it, these days.

Besides. She’s fairly sure that Ward wouldn’t dare lift a finger against her if she’s useful to him, if she has something to offer, here. It seems to be the only way out of this situation; there’s no way she can take both of them on. She could message someone for back-up, but she’ll need to buy some time in order to send the message.

So this is the logical choice.

Decided but still on high alert, Jemma slowly lowers her knife. She was never going to use it, anyway - she still carries an ICER, for goodness’ sake.

‘Do you have a tail?’

Ward shakes his head no, frowning ever so slightly. Jemma takes a stiff step backwards.

‘Come through.’

She allows them to walk past her into the apartment as she goes to check for damage to the lock. Should hold, she decides. With a quick glance down the hall to make sure they’re alone, she bolts the door once more.

Ward sees every practiced motion. She knows he does.

She ignores his gaze anyway.

-

-

Jemma works at fixing Kara’s face in silence. She never requests it, but it’s what she gets regardless. She’s not sure if she’s entirely thankful for it, for the way it hangs heavy in the air, thick and cloying, interrupted only by the thrumming tension. It just seems preferable to the alternative.

To  _any_  alternative.

The thing is, even though she’s focused on disabling the nano-electronics so that she can safely remove Kara’s mask, she can still see Ward out of the corner of her eye. She knows he’s taking stock of her grimy little apartment: the still-packed bags, the general state of disrepair. The marked lack of food.

It must be taking him considerable effort to remain silent, she thinks. Or not. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe that was never Grant Ward, anyway. 

Her frown deepens, discomfort increasing, and she redoubles her attention on the task at hand.

‘Thank you,’ Kara murmurs after a while, when Jemma’s not even in the vicinity of finishing. The woman manages to utter it without so much as a twitch of the muscles around her mouth, and the astounding facial control, combined with the face of Jemma’s old mentor, is completely surreal.

She isn’t even going to pretend she isn’t rattled by it.

‘Well, you haven’t seen what I’ve done just yet. It might be terrible.’ 

‘It can’t be worse than it already is.’

She hums in agreement, unable to even begin to understand what it must be like to be stripped of everything that’s  _you_  and forced to live a charade.

Kara’s eyes widen all of a sudden, almost comically.

‘Not that – she’s a beautiful woman, Agent May. I’m… oh boy.’

Jemma gives Kara an expression that’s something like a smile, but it’s probably a little too tense to warrant the label. Honestly, she’s mostly silently challenging Ward to contradict Kara’s words, to utter a single word against May.

He remains silent. 

Oddly enough, that gives her the first glimmer of hope. For the first time, she considers that maybe they can all get out of this intact. Kara will have her face back, Jemma will be alone once more, Ward will be a long, long way away, and they can break whatever truce this is and return to how things were.

But of course, he has to ruin it. He has to try to breach the one topic she absolutely will not tolerate.

‘Listen. I never really got a chance to thank you, for – ’ 

‘ – We’re not discussing that now.’

They’re not. She can’t. She can’t think of that period, of Fitz struggling to remember who anyone was, Skye dealing with her roiling pain. She can’t think of sitting guard by the security footage of his cell, a silent sentinel ready to raise the alarm and stop him from hurting these people any further. She can’t think of how it became almost an obsession, a fixation, to stare at his face and try to work out the puzzle. Try to work out where she went wrong, what she missed, because how could she have possibly missed something this big? This significant?

She can’t think of finding him in a pool of his own blood, of racing down with the medics to save his damn life. How terrified she was in those moments, and how sickened her own terror made her, because why should she care? Why should she feel like it was _her_ bleeding out too? But all she could see was the man she called her brother, desperately needing her help picking up the pieces, and everything in her was pulling to help (but why?  _Why?_ ).

She can’t think of how she couldn’t even tell anyone, not when Ward’s shadow followed everything Skye did, when May poured everything she had into making sure the Wards of the world would never hurt these girls again, when she couldn’t even so much as mention Ward’s name to Fitz, when it would send him into such a  _rage_ , and it felt like she’d brought the silence of the pod back to the surface with her, like she could scream and it would mean nothing,  _nothing_ , and everything was red, her entire world was red, and –

She can’t even think about it. Any of it.

So she’s not discussing it. 

That apparently rubs Ward the wrong way, though.  _Good_ , she thinks to herself. She can match his anger with her own.

(She has  _so much anger_.)

He spreads his hands. 

‘Alright. What would you like to discuss, then? How about how exposed you are out here on your own?’

‘I’d rather not discuss anything, actually,’ she replies icily, and her voice carries the deadly undertones of the threat she’ll never follow through with, the ferocious intent. Her message is as clear as it was on that day:  _don’t push me._  

He puts his hands up in surrender, backing up to lean against the opposite wall.

But the longer she works in the silence that has fallen, the more enraged she becomes at the implications behind his statement. He thinks she’s on her own? He thinks they’d just –

She swallows angrily, tries to find her centre.

_Don’t say anything, it’s not worth it, don’t say anything, don’t say anything, don’t…_

‘I’m not on my own,’ she spits out, losing her internal battle. May always taught her to control the anger, harness it, but how can she? How can she possibly control this when it oozes from her constantly, infusing every action she completes with a sense of terrible purpose? And now he’s  _here_  and it positively pulses from her, and she can’t do a damn thing.

(What use is her anger now?)

He raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t comment further. It speaks volumes.

‘Do you honestly – May has got people everywhere.  _Everywhere_. So does Bobbi.’

‘Never said they didn’t.’ 

‘And Lance has got some old mates of his trailing me – mercenaries, most likely, so they’re probably too busy staring at my bum to notice anything else, but they’re still  _there_.’

‘Simmons…’

‘I have,’ and she’s laughing now; a bitter, twisted sound, ‘Natasha Romanoff! Natasha Romanoff’s number, programmed into my phone. I can quite literally call  _the Black Widow_  for back-up. I probably should have already.’

Kara’s averting her eyes as discreetly as possible. He’s quiet, watching her with too much calm and  _goddamn_  him, how dare he just sit there? 

‘Did you  _really_  think that they would just abandon me?’ 

The expression that crosses his face tells her that that’s exactly what he thinks. If she was angry before, now she’s positively seething.

‘I didn’t betray them, Ward,’ she says, voice almost a hiss. ‘Our situations aren’t even remotely comparable.’

‘Look, I don’t know your situation. All I have is what I see, and what I know. What I see is you struggling to get by –  _on your own_  – and what I know is SHIELD has a history of abandoning their own.’

‘Grant!’ Kara admonishes – softly, but firmly. The look he shoots her suggests that this is an argument they’ve had before.

Jemma doesn’t care, though, because she can’t believe what she’s hearing.

‘Trip died!’ she cries at him. ‘ _Died_ , instead of abandoning his own! How dare you?’ 

He seems genuinely saddened by that, eyes wide and regretful, but she’s too angry to even look at him for long.

‘God, after what you did – to Skye, to Fitz and I – ’

‘ – I saved your – ’

‘ – Stop.’ She closes her eyes, waves her free hand. ‘I can’t hear that argument. You didn’t have to put us on that plane in the first place so  _please_ , don’t insult me by saying that what you did was for the best. That you  _saved_  us.’

His posture seems to sag a little at that. 

‘That’s fair,’ he replies quietly.

Jemma didn’t expect that, didn’t expect any sort of acquiescence, so it throws her a little. It allows time for some of the anger to seep out of her, and she realises she’s given him the satisfaction of a reaction when she never wanted that. God. She never wanted that. 

With a shake of her head, she turns back to Kara’s face. 

‘I’m not on my own,’ she finally bites out, once she’s got herself somewhat in check again. ‘And I don’t need to be saved. Not be anyone, but  _especially_  not by you.’

They lapse into uncomfortable silence. Jemma feels like she could cry, which is absurd – she’d been positive she cried herself out in the first week on her own.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Ward asks after a while, voice still infuriatingly calm for the most part but finally,  _finally_  holding hints of tension. Jemma doesn’t look up from Kara’s face, but she knows he’ll take her lack of response as tacit permission to continue anyway.

(Actually. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know at all, anymore. Fuck. She has no idea.)

(He asks.) 

‘When did May teach you to pick a tail?’

‘You think Skye’s the only one she trained?’ Jemma shoots back. The rest of the retort is on her lips:  _May trained us both because she had to. She had to teach us to protect ourselves, because **you**  decided to shirk those duties. _

But she doesn’t say it. She doesn’t know why she holds back, why she allows him off the hook this time. 

(She’s just so angry, all of the time, and she’s  _so_   _tired_  of it.)

‘I was on assignment,’ she replies flatly, managing to prise away another large section of the mask. The sooner she can get the mask off, the sooner this is over. 

‘On assignment,’ he repeats, almost passive aggressive in how little disbelief he colours the phrase with. 

 _Just say it_ , she thinks. Stop holding back. Just say it. 

But he doesn’t.

‘Undercover,’ she clarifies.

And for the first time since he kicked in her door, Ward seems genuinely thrown off. His face is a mixture of shock and horror, and Jemma feels a hollow sort of satisfaction at the sight. She’s sure the grim smugness shows on her face.

‘Wait, I saw you there,’ Kara says, her surprised voice breaking through the stunned silence. She looks across Ward, as though seeking permission to continue. Ward gives her the most subtly incredulous look, almost like he can’t understand why she would even ask, and it’s so painfully familiar that Jemma feels sick to her stomach.

Or perhaps it’s the talk of her Hydra op that’s making her want to vomit. Hard to ascertain.

She swallows thickly.

(It _burns._ )

‘It was… after,’ Kara continues. She doesn’t need to clarify.  _After_  can only mean one thing, in her context. ‘They promoted you?’ 

Jemma nods once, briskly. She tries to ignore the careful way Ward’s regarding her. 

‘You must be pretty special if even  _I_  heard about you, huh.’

‘So the theory goes, yes,’ she replies, gritting her teeth. Kara’s eyes grow large at the sight.

‘Oh, I’m… I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean – ’

‘ – No, please don’t. I…’ Jemma sighs, closing her eyes briefly and shaking her head. ‘You were just being polite. They considered me a valuable asset, yes.’

It falls silent again, no one really knowing what to say to that, but this time it’s Jemma who feels the need to fill the blankness.

‘I’m so sorry they did this to you,’ she says quietly. Kara closes her eyes briefly, before fixing her gaze on Jemma’s once more. ‘I’m… I know that’s woefully inadequate, it really is, but for what it’s worth…’

‘I know. Thank you.’

 _Fuck Hydra_ , is what Jemma really wants to say. Wants to scream it from the rooftops, etch it into her skin, spit it at the smoldering ashes of a freshly burnt Hydra stronghold.

But she doesn’t, just like she hasn’t at any point in this whole mess of a situation. She just lets the anger flood her veins, propel her movements, and she continues working. She’s peeling away the last little bit of the mask, by Kara’s left temple, when Kara speaks up again.

‘You were on the thing with the kid, right? The genius gifted they took out.’

Jemma is hyperaware of Ward’s mildly alarmed gaze on her, but she doesn’t have time to think about it more critically because they’re interrupted by a sudden crashing sound. Ward rushes over to the window, peering down at the street.

‘Yeah, we’ve got company,’ he states. Calm, as though the front door to her dingy little building hasn’t just been kicked in by what are most likely armed insurgents. His nonchalance sparks her latent anger again.

‘You said no one followed you!’ she accuses, swallowing down her panic.

‘They didn’t,’ Kara insists, standing up from her chair.

Ward looks at Jemma significantly. ‘Don’t you think it’s possible that _other_ parties would be interested in tracking two high-level SHIELD operatives and the leading xenobiologist in the world?’

_Fuck you for knowing that about me. Fuck you._

‘Well, thanks so much for bringing this raining down upon me,’ she grits out.

Her fury just bounces off him.

‘Let us help you,’ Ward insists.

‘You’ve helped enough.’ She starts shoving her medical supplies into her last free bag. This won’t be the first time she’s fled insurgents intent on bringing her in.

Not that he’d know that.

‘Just trust me.’

Jemma freezes.

‘Trust?’ she repeats, straightening upright, and she knows her voice is bordering on hysterical now but she considers it a point of pride that it hasn’t edged into that territory before now.

‘At any given moment, I have no idea what you’ll do. You treated us like family, but then you threw us out of a plane. You  _set your own family on fire._  Why, the  _hell_ , should I trust you?’

Of all the outbursts, apparently that wasn’t the one he’d anticipated. He just stares.

‘Trust  _me_ ,’ Kara interrupts, a sense of urgency underpinning her words. Jemma looks across to see the other woman nodding earnestly. ‘I owe you a debt. Let me repay it.’

Jemma shakes her head helplessly.

‘I don’t…’  _trust anyone right now_ , she fills in mentally. There are sounds down the end of the corridor now, growing louder with each passing second.

And then, she witnesses something truly shocking. Ward’s jaw muscles bunching in frustration.

(The familiarity is _sickening_.)

‘Simmons, if you don’t come with us right now, you’re theirs. Trust  _that_.’

He’s right. She wishes he wasn’t, but he is. She’s missed her window of opportunity.

Closing her eyes briefly, Jemma focuses every ounce of the anger thrumming beneath her skin into her gaze, which she then levels onto him. He needs to  _understand_ , dammit. He needs to understand this.

(And Grant Ward is not one to scare easily, but he almost physically recoils at the vehemence on her face.) 

‘Get me somewhere safe,’ she demands, voice low and deadly, ‘and then I never want to see you again.’

He blinks back at her, before nodding once, slowly.

‘Great!’ Kara says in a tense voice, grabbing one of Jemma’s bags. ‘Fantastic. Let’s go.’ Ward strides over to the window.

Jemma hesitates for a moment longer.

She thinks, I’m making a terrible mistake.

She thinks, May’s people are going to see this. Bobbi’s. Lance’s.

She thinks,  _I haven’t a clue what to trust anymore_.

But then she grabs her remaining bag and follows them down the fire escape.

 

-

-

 

‘You never did tell us why you left SHIELD,’ Kara points out, once they’re outside the city limits.

Jemma allows that to hang in the air for a minute or so.

‘I didn’t, did I.’

Kara is content to let it drop for now, but Ward just stares.

(It feels like he sees more than he has any right to.)

Jemma wraps her coat more tightly around herself, curling her secrets closer to her chest, then hikes her duffel further up her shoulder and keeps walking.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title (and series name) from 'Iscariot' by Walk the Moon.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
